


Morris Waited

by pullthewaterworks



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Jack Kelly is in here somewhere, Just not mentioned, LIKE EVER, Other, Physical Abuse, Trigger warning: abuse, crutchie is only mentioned in passing so he's not really a big part, oscar is abusive and so is his dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:34:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3795139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pullthewaterworks/pseuds/pullthewaterworks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morris could hardly remember a time before any of it. Yet he kept waiting for that time to return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morris Waited

**Author's Note:**

> I once again would like to warn all readers about an abuse trigger warning. The majority of this story is focused around that, and I need to make sure that everyone knows what they're getting into before they start reading.

Morris could hardly remember a time before any of it.

A time before when he didn’t follow Oscar blindly into whatever sick, cheap job his brother could find.

A time before Oscar drank their money away at the end of each day, growing all the more surly and disagreeable because of it, with every day that passed by.

A time before he and his brother beat a little crippled boy in the street with his own crutch. 

And yet, there had been a time before all of it, he knew there had been. 

 

He could remember it in little snatches: the sighing of a woman singing him a lullaby when he was four, a battle with Oscar, using sticks for swords when he was six, the stinging in his knee when he was seven, and slipped and scraped it on the pavement. 

He could also remember when he was eight, and Oscar, eleven at the time his cheeks chubby and rosy with childhood, shaking him awake in the middle of the night, and telling him that they had to leave. Now. Forever.

It was a blur, that night. Morris is sure that he must have cried, but he can’t remember actually doing it, and he’d wondered why they needed to leave so badly

 

Now, he knew.

Now he could remember his father.

His loud-voiced, angry father, and the way that his mother would hide Morris and Oscar from him on the nights when he came home, shoving them into the closet, covering them with dusty-smelling coats, and warning them not to make a sound.

She would go out to meet him, dancing around the words of their conversations carefully, doing her best not to make him angry, not to make him lash out. 

She failed every night.

She never cried, however. Not in front of her husband, not in front of her boys. Especially not in front of her boys. 

Morris could remember the nights after his father went to sleep and his mother retrieved them from the closet, warning them to be quiet, before retreating to the next room., and he could hear the faint sniffles and he could see the desperate swelling of her eyes the next morning, puffed up from crying the whole night long, while she smiled at he and Oscar, asking them if they wanted bread or oatmeal for breakfast.

He could remember the bruises on his mother, peppering her upper arms and jaw. He could remember the blood that sometimes caked at her hairline after a particularly bad night. 

Most of all, he could remember the night when Oscar told him they had to go. That night, she hadn’t come back to retrieve them from the closet. That night, she was lying in the kitchen, her eyes wide and glassy, unseeing.

 

It was on nights like this, when Morris sat, leaning back against the wall, a cigarette clamped tightly between his teeth, his jaw smarting from Oscar’s fist that he wondered if he ought to run again. 

He could do it.

He was eighteen. He could make it.

Yet he never ran.

He always walked right back home, right back to Oscar.

Oscar would grab him in a rough embrace, pulling him to his chest, muttering apologies, swearing up and down that he’d never do it again.

Once he’d even cried.

Morris never responded. He took the embraces with no reaction, knowing full well that they’d be nothing but a memory by the next evening, after Oscar had consumed one too many glasses of whiskey.

Morris could hardly remember a time before that, when his brother’s embraces and apologies and tears had meant something.

And yet there had been a time when they had.

So he stayed.

And he waited for that time to return.


End file.
